Science: Lysenko's Legacy

During Stalin's iron rule, he commanded virtually unlimited support for
his outlandish agricultural schemes, controlled the direction of
research in areas far beyond his competenceand set back Soviet
genetics nearly a generation. Indeed, when Izvestia last week belatedly
revealed the death of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko at age 78 in a brief
back-page announcement, his bitter legacy was still all too apparent.
Only now are the biological sciences in the U.S.S.R. finally recovering
from what the American geneticist I. Michael Lerner calls "the most
bizarre chapter in the history of modern science."